from the spying-in-the-service-of-seduction dept

By now, most people who shop online are aware of the way in which companies try to tailor their offers based on your previous purchasing and browsing history. Being followed by strangely relevant ads everywhere is bad enough, but what if the government started using the same approach in its communications with you? That's one of the key ideas explored in an interesting new article by Zeynep Tufekci, strikingly presented on Medium, with the title "Is the Internet good or bad? Yes."

To understand the actual -- and truly disturbing -- power of surveillance, it's better to turn to a thinker who knows about real prisons: the Italian writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was jailed by Mussolini and did most of his work while locked up. Gramsci understood that the most powerful means of control available to a modern capitalist state is not coercion or imprisonment, but the ability to shape the world of ideas.

The question then becomes: how can people's ideas be shaped so as to control them? Simply bombarding the population with messages only works for a while, until people become jaded and resistant to them. That's where Edward Snowden's revelations about "big data surveillance" come in, Tufekci suggests:

Individually tailored, subtle messages are less likely to produce a cynical reaction. Especially so if the data collection that makes these messages possible is unseen. That's why it's not only the NSA that goes to great lengths to keep its surveillance hidden. Most Internet firms also try to monitor us surreptitiously.

She's worried about this approach being used to influence people's political behavior, and points to a recent study in Nature that explored precisely this area:

By altering a message designed to encourage people to vote so that it came with affirmation from a person's social network, rather than being impersonal, the researchers had shown that they could persuade more people to participate in an election. Combine such nudges with psychological profiles, drawn from our online data, and a political campaign could achieve a level of manipulation that exceeds that possible via blunt television adverts.

Indeed, Tufekci thinks the process has already begun:

During a break [in a conference called "Data-Crunched Democracy"], I cornered the chief scientist on Obama's data analytics team, who in a previous job ran data analytics for supermarkets. I asked him if what he does now -- marketing politicians the way grocery stores market products on their shelves -- ever worried him. It's not about Obama or Romney, I said. This technology won't always be used by your team. In the long run, the advantage will go to the highest bidder, the richer campaign.

He shrugged, and retreated to the most common cliché used to deflect the impact of technology: "It’s just a tool," he said. "You can use it for good; you can use it for bad."

That's hardly very comforting, and neither is Tufekci's concluding thought:

Internet technology lets us peel away layers of divisions and distractions and interact with one another, human to human. At the same time, the powerful are looking at those very interactions, and using them to figure out how to make us more compliant. That's why surveillance, in the service of seduction, may turn out to be more powerful and scary than the nightmares of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

from the watching-over-you dept

One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:

a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses, daycares, and madhouses, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term.

The Metropolitan Police is hoping to use crowd-sourcing to identify people suspected of committing crimes in last year's riots in London.

Officers are to upload up to 2,800 CCTV images taken during the disorder in August on to its smartphone app.

What's particularly striking about this scheme is the scale:

"My hope is that the two-thirds of Londoners who own smartphones will download this app, and help us identify people we still need to speak to.

We need Londoners to browse through the app every week or so as new images will appear regularly. This is a fantastic way for Londoners to help us to fight crime."

In the case of the London riots, the CCTV images may be relatively unequivocal about crimes being committed; but the new scheme is already being extended beyond those exceptional events:

The app will also include a further 2,000 images of people wanted by the police for offences not connected to the riots.

That's worrying because there is no way of knowing what these people are accused of -- they might, for example, be involved in legitimate street protests against the UK government, or against multinational corporations in the UK, both of which have been subject to controversial policing in the capital. That seems a real possibility, given what Facewatch, the company behind the scheme's technology, says about its service:

An online crime reporting system for businesses to report crime providing the full evidential package required by the police

A way for businesses to deter crime by instantly sharing images of suspects between group members

All images from reported crimes are viewed by the police who will try to identify and match suspects using the information provided.

This raises the prospect not only of deterring crime, but of deterring protests, since participating companies will be able to pass photos of protesters who are alleged to have committed criminal acts to the police, who can then add the faces to all the others on their smartphone app. Londoners can then help identify them without concerning themselves about the legitimacy of the requests, since they will just be part of the constantly-updated stream of alleged criminals. Jeremy Bentham would have been proud of such an efficient, anonymous system of control.